Seeking calm on the cancer ward

When people choose to have their leukemia treated aggressively, it's a big commitment, more so than for almost any other cancer. With this therapy — three days of the drug daunorubicin, which comes in a reddish color so distinctive that one of my patients, a former chemist, used it in his professional life as a dye for plastics, and seven days of the drug cytarabine, which is infused continuously over 168 hours — we offer them the chance to be cured of a disease moving like wildfire with a stiff breeze behind it at the height of drought.